‘Hungry
to help’
University Of Virginia Student Refugee Wynn Nyane Wants To Change
The Lives Of Burma’s Forgotten Children

May 7, 2004 --
Wynn LeiLei Nyane, a University of Virginia foreign affairs
major who will graduate May 16, is trying to find her place in
the world.

Born
in Burma to a Burmese father and a Malaysian mother, Nyane had
to flee Burma in the 1990s with members of her family
in the aftermath of a military coup.
Eventually, the Nyanes were granted political asylum in the United States,
but the experience left her feeling adrift.

“Where
do I belong?” Nyane asked. “ I’m not actually
a Burmese person anymore after living in America for five years. My thinking
has become
too provocative. I have become very skeptical of authority. On the other
hand, am I really going to be American? I don’t know. I’m
still trying to figure everything out.”

Nyane,
24, is sure about one thing: something must be done to help the
Burmese refugees — particularly
the children — who have had to flee oppression
and persecution in their homeland and are now amassed by the millions in
official refugee camps and illegal settlements along the border
of Thailand and Burma.

“When
children are born in an official refugee camp, they have a higher
likelihood that they will get refugee status,” Nyane said. But the children
born to refugees living in unofficial settlements are stateless, because neither
the
Thai nor Burma governments recognize them as citizens.

Furthermore,
these children and their families are subjected to squalid living
conditions. Their
plight is all the more compelling to Nyane because
she
knows how easily she might have been one of them.

Nyane
was only 8 years old when a revolution and a military coup wracked
her country
and her family was temporarily torn apart. The military
regime blacklisted
her father, who worked for Burmese television news, making it impossible
for him to get work. After three years of privation, her mother returned
to her
native Malaysia and found work in Singapore, where she was later
joined by Nyane’s
father. But Nyane and her sisters, the eldest of which was 18, were
not permitted to leave the country. They lived without their parents
in an apartment near their
grandmother and an aunt. In 1996, their father spirited the four sisters
out of Burma, and the family was reunited in Singapore.

“My
father is a good man,” she said. “He has sacrificed
everything for us, and he’d do it again if he had to. My
mother is the best mom caring for us. … I love them with
all my heart.”

Two
years after leaving Burma, her father took a job in the United
States with Radio Free Asia and moved
his family to America, where
they were
granted political
asylum. Fearing for the safety of his daughters, he bid Nyane
and her sisters not to get involved in Burmese politics. However,
working
as
a translator
for the International Rescue Committee in Charlottesville, she
befriended two Burmese
families who told her about the deplorable conditions in the
border settlements. Their stories disturbed her, and her conscience
would
not allow her to
sit idly by and do nothing.

With
the support of a scholarship from U.Va.’s Center for Global
Health, Nyane traveled to Thailand in summer 2002 to investigate,
from
a health perspective, the living conditions of the refugee
camps and illegal settlements and to develop
a plan (with the subsequent support of a U.Va. Harrison Undergraduate
Research Award) to provide nutrition, health care and education
to stateless Burmese children.

Because
she is a refugee living in America on an indefinite stay, Nyane
has no passport to facilitate
foreign travel, so
before
she could make
the trip,
she
had to apply for a refugee travel document. Even with the
document, Nyane said, she lived in fear.

“I
knew that I wouldn’t have the protection of any government
[during my trip],” she said. “I could just disappear
and nobody would even notice.”

The
conditions Nyane found along the Thai-Burma border appalled her:
children with scabies,
eating leaves they had foraged;
non-existent sanitation; and refugees being exploited
as cheap day labor in
Thailand
and elsewhere.
She
took many photographs,
including one of a young child with an ancient face who
had been adopted by people who had found him abandoned by the
roadside.

“That
little child’s face grabs me,” she said of the picture. “I
think I ought to be able to do something about [his
situation].”

While
in the camps, Nyane ran into a variety of problems. She was not
able to eat the prepared food because
of
the poor sanitation,
so she
ate only
raw fruits
and vegetables.

She appealed to the United Nations Children’s Fund for books
on health, so she could teach hygiene to camp residents, but when
UNICEF found that she
was staying with former political prisoners, she
said, the books were not delivered.

In
a culture where young people traditionally defer to the wisdom
of their elders, rather than
the other
way
around, Nyane found
her youth
to be an
impediment. Few adults seemed willing to embrace
her ideas for changing the lives of the
border children – such as feeding the children
while they were at school, as an incentive for them
to come to lessons and to get them playing with other
children in a safe environment.

“The
question I have been facing is, are they going to listen?” she
said. “Will
they have enough of an idea that young people
can do something?”

Michael
J. Smith, professor of politics at U.Va., has supervised Nyane
on three independent studies
and gotten
to know her
well. “Wynn has an extraordinary
commitment to helping these children,” he
said. “She is very courageous,
traveling to the Thai-Burma border to work
with refugee children. She has a remarkable
single-mindedness
and a graciousness. She represents the idealistic
hope for
the future that we hold for all our students.
She will go far because she is determined to
make a difference in the world.”

Nyane
is now applying for jobs with agencies that
focus on refugee questions, but despite
her resolve
to make
a difference,
she
is pessimistic about
the future of Burma’s forgotten children.
Even if the country’s government would
change tomorrow, she said, too many of these
children have been raised without education,
nutrition, medicine or hope.

Furthermore,
the refugees speak little English, Nyane
said, and that hampers efforts to publicize
their
plight to the
world community.
She believes
that international attention, including
putting pressure on the Thai
and Burmese
governments and
boycotting companies that do business with
the Burmese military regime, would be a
catalyst for change.

“We have to have humanity when we are dealing with refugee issues, because
the refugees have been, in a way, raped by their own government,” she said. “They
have been looted, murdered, persecuted
because of their ethnicity and their beliefs, and experiencing all these issues
in their own country. People have the right
to live and enjoy life, and the Burmese
people don’t, so everybody has
to help.”

Contact:
Matt Kelly, (434) 924-7291

FOR
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Contact the Office
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